Amazon’s Internet-of-things strategy takes shape

Amazon AMZN today unveiled Dash Buttons, an easy way for customers to order select bulk goods via an internet-connected button, and yesterday launched Home Services, an on-demand installation and handyman service. Combined, they show that the e-commerce giant has a clear understanding of how the Internet-of-things will benefit its business. And it isn’t going to be shy about capitalizing on connectivity to build its bottom line.

Dash Buttons are an adaptation of Amazon’s voice-controlled Dash ordering system that lets people speak to order new grocery items, and will allow Amazon Prime members to order one item with the push of an WiFi-based connected button. Amazon has 17 brands (including Bounty and Tide) on board at launch, so folks can re-order their bulk goods with a button-click.

Amazon also has advertised a developer program that allows companies to build re-ordering buttons directly into their own hardware. Listed on that page are partners such as Whirlpool (re-order laundry supplies), Brother (ink and toner), Brita (water filters) and Quirky (which is launching a line of appliances including a fancy pour-ver coffee machine). An Amazon spokesman says the first Dash-enabled devices will start showing up in the fall.

So what Amazon has is a retrofit strategy for connecting smart appliances to its e-commerce operations and a future-facing strategy for the coming flood of connected devices. And all of this is geared around making buying products from Amazon as easy as possible. The plan already was somewhat validated by the popular Internet-of-things startup If This Then That, which in February launched a one-button app that let users assign one task to a single button. For example, one of my one-button tasks was was posting a message to Slack whenever I left my desk.

The simplicity of one-button tasks are appealing, although it could lead to a mess of packages ending up at people’s doors if Amazon doesn’t try to minimize waste on its end, by grouping shipments together when possible. People on Twitter seem mostly concerned about pets and small children playing with the Dash Buttons and ordering multiples of their Kraft Macaroni and Cheese boxes, although Amazon notes that if the button is pressed more than once, the order doesn’t go through on the second time, and you’ll get a smartphone notification about it.

Amazon also recently launched Home Services, following up on last year’s opening of a home automation e-store devoted to connected gadgets for the home — many of which require a professional installer. So now Amazon can sell these devices along with the person who can install them.

It also is focusing on maintenance, via a network of service providers that it can call on for its network of suppliers or for its own planned connected home play –something I’ve previously advised companies interested in the connected home to do as a way of closing the loop. Because while data and the algorithms that will be used to detect when there is actually a problem in the home are going to be an essential ingredient, we will still need the people on the ground to fix those problems for a long time to come.

So far, Amazon is impressing me with its understanding of how the Internet-of-things can affect its business. With Dash, it’s making an offensive play to ring up more sales as devices come online. With Amazon Home Services, it’s making a defensive play as other large companies try to become more vertically integrated. My only question is where does the voice-activated Amazon Echo speaker fit into all of this? Is it, like the original Dash, more of a pilot devices designed to gather usage data to build other products, or is it an integral element for home control as I’m hoping?

Amazon is completely redefining one click buying

Amazon is completely redefining “one click buying,” making it possible for customers to buy more of an item by clicking a physical button in their house.

The new “Dash Buttons” will target customers who generally use Amazon to buy certain products — like paper towels, for instance — but sometimes end up going to physical stores for those items instead. The Dash Buttons could help Amazon keep more of those sales on its platform by encouraging customers to keep the devices near where they store or use a particular item.

Dash Button is simple to set up. Use the Amazon app on your smartphone to easily connect to your home Wi-Fi network and select the product you want to reorder with Dash Button. Once connected, a single press automatically places your order. Amazon sends an order alert to your phone, so it’s easy to cancel if you change your mind. Unless you elect otherwise, Dash Button responds only to your first press until your order is delivered.

For now, the Dash Buttons are only available to customers who are invited to order them, and each customer can have a maximum of three. They will initially be available for around 18 products, including laundry detergent and garbage bags, among other items.

Brother printers, Brita water filters and Whirlpool clothes washers and dryers will be among the first to integrate automated or easy ordering into the products. Amazon is working with a company called Quirky, which helps people build products like pet food dispensers. The way it works is that if, for instance, the Brita container notices its water filter has reached the end of its life, it can automatically order a new one — without you needing to do anything.

Amazon’s new toy store is perfect for kids who love science

Amazon on Tuesday introduced a new online store focusing on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) toys that help children develop valuable skills in in-demand fields.

“STEM toys encourage kids to develop skills in the core disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and math,” Amazon’s page reads. “We chose these toys because they have clear goals and encourage kids to learn STEM skills while having fun.”

Some of the toys featured on the site include LEGO sets and engineering kits. The top pick on the store’s front page Tuesday morning was a child-friendly microscope.

Amazon in January reported $214 million in earnings on $29.3 billion in sales for the fourth quarter, which beat analyst expectations.

The surprising place where Amazon is testing its drones

Amazon is testing its drone delivery system at a secret location in Canada, according to The Guardian. The report follows the company’s complaints over U.S. aviation regulators’ speed.

The company is using the undisclosed location to perfect a system CEO Jeff Bezos first revealed at the end of 2013 called Amazon Prime Air. The company’s goal is to use small autonomous drones to deliver customers’ packages with speeds unmatched by ground vehicles. However, it isn’t clear if Amazon’s drone plans would mesh with proposed Federal Aviation Administration regulations governing commercial drone flights.

The largest internet retailer in the world is keeping the location of its new test site closely guarded. What can be revealed is that the company’s formidable team of roboticists, software engineers, aeronautics experts and pioneers in remote sensing – including a former NASA astronaut and the designer of the wingtip of the Boeing 787 – are now operating in British Columbia.

The end goal is to utilize what Amazon sees as a slice of virgin airspace – above 200ft, where most buildings end, and below 500ft, where general aviation begins. Into that aerial slice the company plans to pour highly autonomous drones of less than 55lbs, flying through corridors 10 miles or longer at 50mph and carrying payloads of up to 5lbs that account for 86% of all the company’s packages.

Amazon recently received FAA clearance to test some of its delivery drones in the United States. However, Amazon said last week that FAA approval only applied to an aircraft model that was already obsolete.

The FAA is expected to vote on long-delayed commercial drone rules by the end of the year, potentially putting an end to years of uncertainty regarding the practice.

Amazon wants to help you find a plumber

Amazon is taking aim at dominating yet another area of your life: household services.

The Seattle-based e-commerce company on Monday launched Amazon Home Services, a new platform helping customers find help with a variety of local services. Some of the businesses you can connect with include plumbers, appliance repair, virus removal, grill assembly and even iPhone repair. There are also some more quirky offerings, like voice and Yoga lessons.

The exact services offered depends on your area.

Amazon in January reported $214 million in earnings on $29.3 billion in sales for the fourth quarter. Those earnings were a drop year-over-year, but they were higher than analysts were expecting and marked the company’s first positive earnings after a two-quarter string of losses.

Update: A TaskRabbit spokesperson has reached out to clarify that TaskRabbit is partnering with Amazon on Amazon Home Services; the two services are not competitors. “This represents the first time Clients can hire and schedule Taskers outside the TaskRabbit mobile and web platforms,” said the spokesperson. “Given our Taskers’ extensive handyman experience, having installed more than 40,000 flat-screen TVs and assembled more than 400,000 pieces of furniture over the past 4 years, TaskRabbit was a logical choice for Amazon.”

When office gossip helps the bottom line

If corporations have learned anything in the era of social media, it’s that they can’t stop workers from tweeting, Facebooking, and Instagramming about their jobs. The web has even carved out special places for employees to trade office gossip without -repercussions. At Glassdoor, a repository of anonymous com-pany reviews and salary data, more than 27 million people have contributed information about their employers. Meanwhile, anonymous apps like Whisper and Secret, which surged in popularity last year, circulate juicy rumors about various startups, deals, and executives.

Naturally, that can be perilous for a corporation. Federal labor law protects employees’ rights to talk about things like wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment, making it illegal for companies to interfere. When a damaging rant ricochets around the web, they can only react and respond.

A new service aims to capture the thrill of anonymous office gossip and harness it into something productive. Memo, which launched in January, has already accumulated 10,000 sign-ups from employees of about 1,000 companies, including Amazon AMZN, Deloitte, and Delta DAL. On Memo users post about work-from-home policies and doomed projects. A recent post from a PepsiCo employee called out the company’s planning (poor), work ethic (skewed), and management (oppressive). Another poster bemoaned an acquisition: “I loved my company until it was bought out by Honeywell. The only thing I like about Honeywell is my cubicle and a paycheck.”

Memo’s goal, according to CEO Ryan Janssen, is to surface all manner of vital information about a company, be it rumors, compensation trends, or problems with a strategy. It’s the sort of information everyone except management knows, because everyone is afraid of confronting his superiors. “The problem with companies isn’t that they don’t think the truth can help them,” Janssen says. “It’s that they don’t know the truth and aren’t acting on it.”

In the second quarter, Memo will begin selling advanced tools that allow companies to collect data on employee sentiment, moderate comments, and engage with workers on the app. It’s a big ask—employers surely aren’t amused by what they’re reading. But Janssen insists that this sort of radical transparency is inevitable and that smart companies will get ahead of it. “You can either become a transparent company peaceably, or your employees can open it up for you,” he says.

It wasn’t always this way. When Glassdoor launched in 2008, employers reacted with uncertainty and discomfort, according to CEO Robert Hohman. That has changed. “We live in a much more transparent world. Most employers recognize that public review of their company’s culture is the new normal,” he says. “You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.” The company, which is expected to IPO this year, minimizes wanton aggression by verifying the identities of users and asking them to leave pros along with their cons. The result? Most reviews are favorable. The average CEO approval rating is 67%; the average company rating is 3.2 out of 5.

Several forward-thinking companies already use internal tools for feedback. Squarespace, a New York web-development startup with more than 400 employees, collects anonymous feedback using Google’s survey tool. Kris Passet, Squarespace’s people relations lead, worries that the negativity on an app like Memo may not be productive. “There aren’t many proposed solutions, so it’s just a vacuum for venting basically,” she says. “That’s not very helpful.”

Ryan Smith, CEO of business survey provider Qualtrics, says his company’s internal feedback tool, which is not anonymous, surfaces problems just fine. “Anything that’s said [on Memo] is not going to be a shocker because we’re open with ourselves,” he says. That’s less likely at the large corporations where Memo has gained the most traction. Says Smith: “The old-school companies who have never addressed the feelings in their relationship—they’re going to struggle with that.”

There’s another major twist in Amazon’s drone saga

Amazon said Tuesday that the drones it recently got federal regulators’ permission to test are already obsolete.

The Federal Aviation Administration last week gave Amazon permission to fly one of its drone models for testing and research purposes. Amazon started lobbying for that approval back in July of last year, months after it first revealed plans to deliver packages via drones.

But while the FAA was considering whether or not to approve Amazon’s request to test its drones, the Seattle-based e-commerce company has already made newer, better models, the Wall Street Journalreports.

Via the Journal:

While the Federal Aviation Administration was considering its applications for testing, Amazon had already developed new models so “that the [drone] approved last week by the FAA has become obsolete. We don’t test it anymore,” Paul Misener, Amazon’s vice president for global public policy, said in prepared testimony for a congressional hearing on Tuesday. “We’ve moved on to more advanced designs that we already are testing abroad.”

The FAA in February proposed new commercial drone regulations that would eliminate the need for the agency to approve drone testing on a case-by-case basis. However, the rules as written likely wouldn’t allow for Amazon’s vision of a drone-delivery future. The agency is expected to vote on those rules later this year.

Amazon posted earnings of $0.45 per share and sales of $29.3 billion in January, beating expectations.

Why you shouldn’t buy an Apple TV any time soon

Apple could be readying a major revamp of its Apple TV set-top box, according to a new report.

The new version of the Apple TV hardware will reportedly include an App Store and Siri, Apple’s voice-based digital assistant, according to BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed says Apple will show off the device at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference this June.

The Apple TV hardware report is bolstered by a separate story in the Wall Street Journal early this week indicating Apple is also working on a new service to stream television programming over the Internet. If Apple is indeed working on such a service, it would make sense for the company to introduce new hardware to support it. Apple hasn’t updated the Apple TV hardware in a major fashion since 2012.

It’s unclear how much a new Apple TV set-top box would cost. The current device recently saw a price drop from $99 to $69, but these new rumors may be a good a reason to hold off on purchasing today’s model despite the cheaper cost.

The Apple TV competes with similar offerings from rivals Roku, Amazon and Google, among others. The set-top box market is expected to hit a peak of 265 million worldwide units this year, according to ABI Research.

Apple recently announced a partnership with HBO bringing that network’s upcoming Internet-only streaming service to Apple devices exclusively for the first three months.

Amazon’s drone delivery dreams just took a step closer to reality

This post is in partnership with Time. The article below was originally published at Time.com

By Alex Fitzpatrick, TIME

Amazon’s hopes of delivering shipments to customers via drones got a little more real Thursday as federal regulators granted the company approval to test its unmanned aircraft.

The Federal Aviation Administration gave Amazon’s drones what’s called an experimental airworthiness certificate, which lets the company fly its aircraft for research, testing and crew training purposes. Amazon must follow a handful of rules laid out by the FAA: It must keep flights at 400 feet or below, only fly in daylight, and pilots must hold at least a private pilot’s certificate, among other stipulations. The company also has to report a wealth of data about its drone flights to the agency every month.

The FAA’s Thursday decision comes after Amazon petitioned the agency last July to let it test its drones. In February, the FAA proposed new commercial drone rules that would make it significantly easier to legally operate a drone for money in the U.S., an activity that currently requires case-by-case approval from the agency. However, the plan would require drone pilots to fly their aircraft with “unaided vision” and avoid flying over people, rules that would seem to preclude Amazon’s drone delivery concept.

Is Sling TV the answer to your cord-cutting needs?

I’m frantically tossing couch cushions to the ground, each one resting atop the last in a pile resembling a life-size game of Jenga. The Apple TV remote is missing. Again. As the last cushion slams down, I yell, “I found it!” My arm rises up, thrusting a glimmer of silver and black into the air.

My triumph? Finding our Apple AAPL TV remote. This simple accessory holds enough power over my household that when it goes missing it can cause a chaotic tailspin from which we might never recover.

You see, four years ago we cut the cord. We dropped off our cable box at a Comcast CMCSA office and vowed to never look back. And, for the most part, we haven’t.

We don’t have the option of turning on the TV, finding a channel and watching whatever the network is playing at the time. My family’s viewing habits are such that we have to seek out content we want to watch.

Our setup consists of an Apple TV, a subscription to Netflix NFLX, another to Hulu, and the borrowing of passwords from family members to access programming from HBO Go TWX and Disney DIS. None of this should come as surprise to avid followers of this column, as I posed the question “Is it finally time to cut cable?” ­­­ late last year.

Recently I started using a new over-the-top service from Dish Network DISH called Sling TV, which is currently only available in the U.S.

The service offers live television streaming using your Internet connection. It eliminates the traditional cable model in the sense of forgoing any lengthy contracts or promotional prices for a set amount of time.

The first time I used Sling, I found myself scrolling through the channel lineup. I scrolled past ESPN, TNT, Travel Channel, ABC Family, Disney Channel, and ultimately landed on Food Network. For the next three hours I watched Chopped, a culinary game show, marveling at each contestant’s creativity.

In total, Sling offers more than a dozen channels (including ESPN 2, TBS, HGTV, El Rey, Maker, Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, CNN, and Galavision) for $20 per month. Recently, the streaming service added AMC to its lineup giving subscribers access to hit shows The Walking Dead and Better Call Saul at the same time as cable subscribers. Huzzah!

In addition to the base package, users can add content packages for $5 per month. The three packages consist of a sports lineup (with nine additional channels), a kids offering (with another five channels) and finally a news and info package (which includes four more channels).

The total cost for Sling with the all the extras included is $35 per month; a figure that pales in comparison to the cost of a traditional cable subscription. Just look at your bill and I’m sure you’ll agree. I’d wager even after adding in the cost of a Netflix and Hulu Plus subscription, you’re still saving money.

Currently available on streaming devices from Roku, Amazon AMZN and Microsoft’s MSFT Xbox, Sling plans to add Google’s GOOG Nexus Player in the future. Mobile users will be happy to find iOS and Android apps in the respective stores. Lastly, Sling also has an app for Apple’s OS X and Microsoft’s Windows.

The interface is responsive and laid out in an easy to navigate manner. Channels scroll horizontally across the bottom of the screen, providing a thumbnail of what’s currently on and a glimpse of what’s to come. Sling’s menu also provides a search mechanism along with a selection of movies available for rent.

Recently aired shows are available to watch on-demand, as is the ability to pause or rewind a live program. (Not all channels offer this functionality, such as ESPN.)

The adjustment of going back to live television for someone acclimated to the freedom on-demand affords is still ongoing. At times I enjoy being able to turn on the television, select a channel and be mindlessly distracted. Other times I find myself back in Netflix searching for a new documentary. The end result is still entertainment, only Sling’s offerings require me to relinquish control of what’s currently on the screen.

For someone who is thinking of cutting the cord, Sling is a tempting product. Not only does it offer live television, it also offers live sports.

Previously, when I was asked if ditching cable was a good idea, my response always centered on whether or not the person asking was a sports fan. If so, then I advised to keep cable. With Sling, that’s no longer the case. Granted, the selection is currently limited to ESPN and its long-list of channels. But, hey, it’s a start.

As for that silver remote that’s been the source of so much anxiety at my house. We don’t miss it a bit. Having to switch to Roku in order to access Sling afforded us a larger, harder-to-lose remote.

When the day comes that we finally lose the remote at least we can continue watching live TV. If nothing else, Sling has improved our lives in at least one aspect.

Jason Cipriani is Fortune’s personal technology columnist and the author of its weekly “Logged In” column.